My sixth seventh Citadel gallery. Here you see a great example of some classic Star Castle behaviour: completely destroying a shield ring leads to the cannon regenerating a new ring, and making the player’s job that much harder. This becomes particularly troublesome on higher levels.

Note that Star Citadel has two variants: a modern version, from which these screenshots are taken, and a classic version, which is designed to play as much like the original Star Castle as possible.

Click on the images to see larger versions.

Yeah, it was bad. Like Icarus flying too close to the sun I got wasted because I got too close to the cannon when I attacked it, and got caught by the vicious fury of its energy projectile. Still, with everything combined it's certainly a big, and rather pretty, explosion. This really is the classic ai uchi (simultaneous strike).

And, oh yeah, I am taking full advantage of that. This really isn't something you can do in the original Star Castle arcade game, and I'm not sure I've seen it in any other ports or clones, but I think it adds quite a nice little twist to the game.

That worked really well. It looks like I may have made quite a convincing hole through all three shield layers. When you attack and materialization there's always a chance you might score some hits on the inner layer, which leaves the cannon more vulnerable.

This looks like a solid attack run - it's on target, and there are a good number of bullets in flight. That being said, there is also an energy projectile heading towards my ship so I'm going to need to bug out.

I am out of here to regroup and look for another opportunity to attack. The issue here, is just like the original Star Castle, I'm at risk of completely destroying that outer shield ring, which means the cannon can regenerate a completely new ring in the centre, and the other rings will move outward.

Sneaking back in from the bottom, I'm a bit off target but feeling confident. I am landing shots through the shield rings and past the cannon to destroy segments behind it. This sucker is living on borrowed time.

In the words of Jack Bauer, dammit. My incautious spraying of fire has led to the complete destruction of the outer shield ring, so the cannon has generated itself a new inner shield ring (note the as yet undamaged green ring of shields). This makes my job a bit harder.